The turtle dove sings around a C♮ and C# in sets of three. Click and drag over each phrase above. Those are trills of 64th notes, or maybe even 128th notes. You can call them “hemdemisemiquavers”. To check his pitch, just click the Rabbit Face on the Color Keyboard up top. That’s a C Natural baby!
His trills sound like “turr, turr, turr”, the onomatopoeia that named him. The first trill bends up from C to C#, and the other two bend down from C# to C. In musical notation, a trill is written like so:
A trill is a rapid alteration of adjacent notes. The turtle dove trills notes within a semitone. Like all birds, he is working at a much quicker musical pace than us. In a single trill, he’ll hit 15 or so notes, but the three phrases essentially follow the “up, down, down” movement as indicated above. Up, down, down, rest. Up, down, down, rest. Isn’t it such a dovey thing to mournfully slide down your final note?
If James Joyce were writing this, he’d pun up like this and call it a day:
